I am surprised they've gathered real client data. Standard OPSEC in those sites is to encrypt your delivery address with the public key of the vendor, so unless the vendor is hacked, your personal data should be safe from the market going down.
first and foremost thank you for contributions and activism, you have made the world a better place for the likes of us. Now for the question:
What are your views on the future of the FSF?
Today's software landscape and dangers to freedom seem quite far from the initial days of the FSF, and with that, its purpose and effectiveness seem less relevant today.
Even giants like Microsoft have seen their dominance shattered, and are facing the dilemma of a radical overhaul vs obsolescence.
Do you feel that FSF organization and goals should be radically shaken? How can we better fight for freedom in these strangely connected days?
Their demos are not very nice and mostly vaporware.
For people interested in non-vaporware next generation rendering technology, I suggest you check out this video, based on Path Tracing which is a form of stocastich Ray Tracing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It looks to me like this technology is getting closer and closer to the mainstream, and the results are eons from any raster-based engine.
This is just CNN trying to take a shot at the NYTimes.
A well deserved shot, I'd say. If you publish articles up to very dubious journalistic standards, what do you expect? NYT prestige is taking a good hit with this, I'd be mad at the journalist.
Because at the time, would Java had been under a different license, it had an incredible potential and surely would have enjoyed much wider adoption.
We had to stop using Java due to its non-free license.
And what is more important, the language is fragmented. Its non-freeness motivated the development of several runtimes/stacks, which, TTOMExperience, suffer from compatibility issues.
I'm sorry to say that, but Stallman was spot on with regarding his position about Java.
I feel nervous when I develop using a non-free framework. I much favor using a fully open source stack, as a programmer it frees me about a lot of worries.
The exact wording is (translated to English) "Internet connection required for playing", so I guess it is pretty clear.
I've desisted purchasing some titles because of this warning.
Well, at least in my country such games prominently display: "Internet connection required" in the minimum requirements box.
Given that, returning it because it doesn't work offline is not so easy.
Well it seems some people is not familiar with TrueCrypt. You have an encrypted partition that you can show, and inside it (mixed in the free space) you have a second one. This way if the police forces you to decrypt you partition you can show the fake one, and they have no way of guessing whether you had another one, the most they can do is to destroy it.
Indeed. How can they prove that the "hidden volume" exists?
Their best bet would be to install a spy-camera and watch the subject performing some illegal activity, and that may not even work if he is cautious and goes to some public place with a laptop.
has had his house searched and a significant amount of material taken away by police for forensic examination
Frankly, I can't imagine that even the less prepared script kiddie wouldn't keep all their hacking data inside a TrueCrypt partition allowing him to claim plausible deniability.
That, an open wifi, then claim "it came that way, or I couldn't make my netbook connect, so I had to open it".
Given those basic security measures, what evidence could the police use to incriminate him? Video/screen surveillance? I can't think of any other way.
Aside from what other readers have noted (that getting a 5% return is very optimitics right now), you are not counting long term savings.
That is to say, today we have 1st generation power units which cost 3,500,000$ and save 100,000$ a year. Investing that money in the bank will return you 175,000$, all right, 75,000$ more than buying the machines.
But if you buy the power units, you are investing in power unit technology. So if they get a lot of customers, assume in 5 years time the units will cost 1.000.000$ and save you 300.000$ a year, a 30% ROI, no bank can compete with this. This is what happened with computer hardware, just look 20 years ago!
I guess previous work had the idea right, but actually building a system which can handle millions of links and reply in no time is not a small feature.
This reminds me of the discussion we had previously about the gap from research prototype transistors to having factories actually deliver them.
This is nice in theory, but in practice it has very serious security & management implications. You better don't allow programs to replace its code when called from a normal user, it creates a hell to support.
While I think Microsoft is right with its release cycle, the article is based on the fact the every other browser vendor is releasing snapshots.
For me, the biggest picture is interaction and strategy, not builds. In Webkit, Gecko and Presto, if you are a web developer, you can interact with the engine developer. They have mailing list, good bucktrackers, and a *good attitude* towards fixing bugs.
For Microsoft, if you are using Linux for development (a pretty common case I'd guess) you cannot even try. I doubt Windows users do fare any better. By the way, Windows 7 is not bad, but not usable yet.
I don't see relational databases going away any time soon.
Most (>70%) of the web is using them, and so far, they've worked very well.
What is missing is good support for them from the programming language point of view.
The nature of relational databases is declarative, as you define mathematically what you want, not how. That's a job for the database, and they've got huge compilers and optimizers for it.
Of course, the SQL language is a leaky abstraction of the pure relational calculus, and you have to know certain rules in order you query can be answered efficiently.
SQL doesn't fit well in imperative languages, where all you can do is write down instructions. Compare that with a language like Prolog, which is OOTB a relational database.
The danger in this construction is the implicit paralelism. So with one compiler version your program may happen to run fine, while when another compiler implements the construct in a subtle different way, the program can show a bug.
You know side effects are time depending the most.
Slashdot Mirror
I am surprised they've gathered real client data. Standard OPSEC in those sites is to encrypt your delivery address with the public key of the vendor, so unless the vendor is hacked, your personal data should be safe from the market going down.
Considering Gmane has been for the most part a one-man effort on his free time, what Lars achieved is truly impressive.
I am a newsreader user, and I will certainly miss Gmane. If you will miss it too, show your support to Lars!
I would be great if you could try with recent VP9, which is said to be close to x265.
Dear Richard,
first and foremost thank you for contributions and activism, you have made the world a better place for the likes of us. Now for the question:
What are your views on the future of the FSF?
Today's software landscape and dangers to freedom seem quite far from the initial days of the FSF, and with that, its purpose and effectiveness seem less relevant today.
Even giants like Microsoft have seen their dominance shattered, and are facing the dilemma of a radical overhaul vs obsolescence.
Do you feel that FSF organization and goals should be radically shaken? How can we better fight for freedom in these strangely connected days?
Their demos are not very nice and mostly vaporware. For people interested in non-vaporware next generation rendering technology, I suggest you check out this video, based on Path Tracing which is a form of stocastich Ray Tracing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... It looks to me like this technology is getting closer and closer to the mainstream, and the results are eons from any raster-based engine.
It is likely the case that the VPN providers were involved with some form of SPAM.
Cutting off Visa/Mastercard processing to the spammers clients such as online pharmacies has been a very successful approach:
http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/05/20/2252225/a-new-approach-to-reducing-spam-go-after-credit-processors
No gain = no SPAM
This is just CNN trying to take a shot at the NYTimes.
A well deserved shot, I'd say. If you publish articles up to very dubious journalistic standards, what do you expect? NYT prestige is taking a good hit with this, I'd be mad at the journalist.
Right now I use Haskell, Agda, Coq, Python and C, along dozens of libraries.
Because at the time, would Java had been under a different license, it had an incredible potential and surely would have enjoyed much wider adoption.
We had to stop using Java due to its non-free license.
And what is more important, the language is fragmented. Its non-freeness motivated the development of several runtimes/stacks, which, TTOMExperience, suffer from compatibility issues.
I'm sorry to say that, but Stallman was spot on with regarding his position about Java.
I feel nervous when I develop using a non-free framework. I much favor using a fully open source stack, as a programmer it frees me about a lot of worries.
The exact wording is (translated to English) "Internet connection required for playing", so I guess it is pretty clear. I've desisted purchasing some titles because of this warning.
Well, at least in my country such games prominently display: "Internet connection required" in the minimum requirements box. Given that, returning it because it doesn't work offline is not so easy.
Well it seems some people is not familiar with TrueCrypt. You have an encrypted partition that you can show, and inside it (mixed in the free space) you have a second one. This way if the police forces you to decrypt you partition you can show the fake one, and they have no way of guessing whether you had another one, the most they can do is to destroy it.
Indeed. How can they prove that the "hidden volume" exists? Their best bet would be to install a spy-camera and watch the subject performing some illegal activity, and that may not even work if he is cautious and goes to some public place with a laptop.
has had his house searched and a significant amount of material taken away by police for forensic examination
Frankly, I can't imagine that even the less prepared script kiddie wouldn't keep all their hacking data inside a TrueCrypt partition allowing him to claim plausible deniability.
That, an open wifi, then claim "it came that way, or I couldn't make my netbook connect, so I had to open it".
Given those basic security measures, what evidence could the police use to incriminate him? Video/screen surveillance? I can't think of any other way.
Aside from what other readers have noted (that getting a 5% return is very optimitics right now), you are not counting long term savings.
That is to say, today we have 1st generation power units which cost 3,500,000$ and save 100,000$ a year. Investing that money in the bank will return you 175,000$, all right, 75,000$ more than buying the machines.
But if you buy the power units, you are investing in power unit technology. So if they get a lot of customers, assume in 5 years time the units will cost 1.000.000$ and save you 300.000$ a year, a 30% ROI, no bank can compete with this. This is what happened with computer hardware, just look 20 years ago!
I guess previous work had the idea right, but actually building a system which can handle millions of links and reply in no time is not a small feature.
This reminds me of the discussion we had previously about the gap from research prototype transistors to having factories actually deliver them.
This is nice in theory, but in practice it has very serious security & management implications. You better don't allow programs to replace its code when called from a normal user, it creates a hell to support.
While I think Microsoft is right with its release cycle, the article is based on the fact the every other browser vendor is releasing snapshots.
For me, the biggest picture is interaction and strategy, not builds. In Webkit, Gecko and Presto, if you are a web developer, you can interact with the engine developer. They have mailing list, good bucktrackers, and a *good attitude* towards fixing bugs.
For Microsoft, if you are using Linux for development (a pretty common case I'd guess) you cannot even try. I doubt Windows users do fare any better. By the way, Windows 7 is not bad, but not usable yet.
We had the same problem, so we went with a different setup. We have two big Debian GNU/Linux servers and a lot of HP thin clients.
Each of these runs at 15Watt, so 10 users consume the same that 3 workstations.
I don't see relational databases going away any time soon.
Most (>70%) of the web is using them, and so far, they've worked very well.
What is missing is good support for them from the programming language point of view.
The nature of relational databases is declarative, as you define mathematically what you want, not how. That's a job for the database, and they've got huge compilers and optimizers for it.
Of course, the SQL language is a leaky abstraction of the pure relational calculus, and you have to know certain rules in order you query can be answered efficiently.
SQL doesn't fit well in imperative languages, where all you can do is write down instructions. Compare that with a language like Prolog, which is OOTB a relational database.
The best solution is store your key in a USB key or a trusted machine.
Then run
$ ssh-add
$ ssh -A $HOST # -A tells ssh to forward your agent.
and your key will be trasmitted from machine to machine in memory, so you'll have your private key as long as you are logged in.
The trademark information on the European Trademark Office
Maybe the fact that Apple owns the TM in half the world, was the reason to use the iPhone name.
You know side effects are time depending the most.
That's not easyly doable due to side effects happening. Once you need to check for that, your compiler complexity is almost infite.
Functional programming has been trying to address this with varying dregrees of success.